Experimentally testing Hardy's theorem on nonlocality with entangled mixed states

Hardy's theorem on nonlocality has been verified by a series of experiments with two-qubit entangled pure states. However, in this paper we demonstrate the experimental test of the theorem by using the two-photon entangled mixed states. We first investigate the generic logic in Hardy's proof of nonlocality, which can be applied for arbitrary two-qubit mixed polarization entangled states and can be reduced naturally to the well-known logic tested successfully by the previous pure state experiments. Then, the optimized violations of locality for various experimental parameters are delivered by the numerical method. Finally, the logic argued above for testing Hardy's theorem on nonlocality is demonstrated experimentally by using the mixed entangled-photon pairs generated via pumping two type-I BBO crystals. Our experimental results shows that Hardy's proof of nonlocality can also be verified with two-qubit polarization entangled mixed states, with a violation of about 3.4 standard deviations.